Sebastian Horsley: the tragedy of Soho's self-styled dandy

Sebastian Horsley in his Soho flat. Photograph: Nick Cunard/Rex Features

The myth is that Sebastian Horsley, self-styled "dandy in the underworld", lived his short life in fearless honesty and flamboyant self-revelation. It isn't true. He kept one important aspect of his life pretty quiet, and now that he is dead – of a heroin overdose at 47 – there seems little point in staying silent on his behalf. He suffered from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder, a slave to the quiet torture of the need to conduct rituals of incessant, superstitious counting. Like many a drug addict, his tragedy was his ceaseless resort to self-medication, in pursuit of a little peace from the inescapable demands of his own mind. He was admirably brave, as well as less admirably full of bravado, poor man.